"Wet" Enterprise: Selected Saloons of the Old West

The setting is the Blackfeet Indian Reservation located in  Montana east of Glacier National Park and bordering Canada, an area larger than the state of Delaware.    There Thomas Patrick McGovern, an immigrant from Northern Ireland and saloonkeeper, fell in love with Sophie Gill Longevin, a half-Indian girl just out of her teens, and they wed. The couple is shown above. Often such marriages ended badly, but the McGoverns’ union lasted until Tom’s death, still living among the Blackfeet.   McGovern was born in July 1863, likely in County Cavan.  Of his early years the records are silent, nor is it clear when he immigrated to the United States and settled in a small Montana town called Dupuyer.  This hamlet drew French fur trappers, sheep ranchers from England and Scotland, and a motley group of adventurers.  As one observer put it:   “The settlement was typically wild and unruly, as were most western towns.” There in the 18...

          Milton Edward Joyce, proprietor of the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona, has been called “one tough old bird” and, as above, pictured as a mean-eyed Western gunslinger.  Most often cited is Joyce’s violent clash in 1888 with the notorious “Doc” Holliday.  “…That’s just one small slice of this remarkable man’s life”  argues one observer, noting that the characterization ignores Joyce’s civic and business contributions.  Both depictions are valid.  There were two sides to Milton Joyce. Born in New York in 1847, Joyce arrived in California in 1862  at the age of fifteen. He was recorded in the 1870 Census working as a blacksmith in San Mateo, California, twenty miles from San Francisco.    By 1880 he had moved to Cochese County, Arizona, when silver was discovered there, initially recorded as a miner living in Tombstone.    Founded in 1879 this boomtown quickly attracted a mix of t...

Shown here standing behind the bar of his saloon, Solomon “Sol” Weinberger was a diminutive five feet, three inches, tall.    His height had little to do with his reputation in Idaho Springs, Colorado, as a genial proprietor and civic-minded citizen of his adopted country.  The diminutive Sol was born in July 1864 in a part of Europe then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of Abraham and Henche Weinberger.    At the age of 17 he emigrated to the United States, arriving in June 1881 aboard the steamer   Normannia,  shown here.     In that move Sol apparently had been preceded by an elder brother, Simon, and two half-brothers, Herman and Nathan, all of whom had settled in Colorado, Simon in boom town Cripple Creek where he was running a saloon. Records indicate that Sol, a bachelor, may have been working in Simon’s saloon and living with Simon’s family that included his wife, Bettie, and son Bernard.  In Cripple C...

             It has always been somewhat of a mystery to me how Western saloons, often in isolated mining camps or other communities with no easy access to the outside world, managed to get the liquor needed to satisfy their thirsty clientele.    For many “Old West” locations, railroads were distant, stage coaches sporadic, and mule trains infrequent.    The answer may lie with Samuel Jaggers, a saloonkeeper and liquor dealer in the mining town of Bannack, Montana, during the 1860s.    In a 1903 newspaper interview Jaggers told all. Sam Jaggers was an Englishman, born in March 1832 in Beulah, a small town in Wales, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth Jaggers.  He was baptized into the Church of England.  When he was 16 he emigrated to the United States along with other family members and settled in Illinois near Galena, a town on the Mississippi River, famous for being the home of Ulysses S. Grant and oth...